If you’re stuck for ideas for Christmas presents this year (and you’ve only got 6 days left before the big day), why not go all nerdy and give your loved ones (or friends) some hosting?

Earlier this year, I was starting to have issues with my website hosts. It was during the Summer months:

• World Cup KickOff was picking up pace and demanding a lot of bandwidth from the thousands of daily users.
• The OnePhatDJ podcast was also gaining a lot of new subscribers through the iTunes listing and pimping a hell of a lot of bandwidth from the same host.

I’m not going to name names as the hosting company have been of a great service to us for a while now. Unfortunately though, the daily quota was capped at 20GB bandwidth and they couldn’t budge on that. So I went off to find another hosting solution to accompany them.

I’d heard lots of good stuff about DreamHost. Not only did they offer all the features you’d expect for a modern website (PHP/MySQL & Ruby On Rails support, mod_rewrite etc) it also offered a phenomenal amount of bandwidth and storage space. You’d be hard pushed to find 2 terrabytes of bandwidth a month, especially at their price. To make life even easier, it didn’t have daily caps. If you managed to go over your quota (tough challenge), they just billed you for it. I was in a hurry to set something up so was sold.

Anyway, six months on and I’m still happy with them. There has been the occasional negative comment about DreamHost around the Webosphere (at least in certain circles) but I can’t say a bad thing about them. It was when a work colleague asked me about them as he was looking for a new host that I realised how cheap you could get a hosting package with them at the moment (all thanks to the two dollar pound).

If you go and sign up for the Crazy Domain Sale package for one year and use the code “LARGEPORTION” (without the quotes), it should only cost you $22.40USD - approximately £11.47GBP at today’s exchange rates. You also get a free .com thrown in with that so if you use one of the many One-Click Installs (which just so happens to include the latest version of WordPress), you could give your friends or family their own blog for Christmas for just over a tenner.

So do something nice (and original) for your loved ones this Christmas. Give them their own website and, hopefully, we can ploy them away from all those dodgy MySpace/Bebo “websites”.

Merry Christmas everyone!